We need to collect PROMs to improve treatments and patient experience

Insight & CarePath solutions not only help doctors to monitor the patient journey but also collect and view patient data to further improve their treatment at Ospedale San Raffaele (HSR).

About the collaboration

Ospedale San Raffaele (HSR) is a highly ranked and prestigious hospital in Italy. It’s one of the IRCCS hospitals, which stands for “Istituto di Ricovero e Cura a Carattere Scientifico”, a title reserved for medical institutions of national interest which are considered a benchmark in their field. The IRCCS title is granted by Italian Department of Health to a very limited number of institutes throughout Italy. This is reflected in the scientific output that HSR delivers.  

One of the IRCCS Ospedale San Raffaele’s directors reached out to Brightfish when they started the value-based healthcare and quality of life program.  

Source: Ospedale San Raffaele (HSR)

The challenge

Value-based healthcare is a healthcare delivery model in which providers, including hospitals and physicians, are paid based on patient health outcomes. Under value-based care agreements, providers are rewarded for helping patients improve their health, reduce the effects and incidence of chronic disease, and live healthier lives in an evidence-based way. 

Value-based care differs from a fee-for-service or capitated approach, in which providers are paid based on the amount of healthcare services they deliver. The “value” in value-based healthcare is derived from measuring health outcomes against the cost of delivering the outcomes. 

The solution

To kick off the value-based healthcare program Ospedale San Raffaele wanted to collect patient outcomes, starting with their pancreatic cancer department. Since double entry and separate logins were strictly off limits, they needed to integrate the outcome collection tools into their electronic medical record system.  

This way, capturing patient outcomes is seamless and doesn’t burden the hospital staff with additional work. The collected outcomes can be used on multiple levels and are visualised on dashboards that are also integrated into the EMR system.  

The IT landscape of Ospedale San Raffaele consists of various applications that are connected (SAP, Daedalus, Galileo, etc). The Brightfish applications are built to integrate with a variety of systems, which made the implementation process quite straightforward and effective. 

Value-Based Health Care Benefits

Patients

Lower Costs & better outcomes

Providers

Higher Patient Satisfaction Rates & Better Care Efficiencies

Payers

Stronger Cost Controls & Reduced Risks

Suppliers

Alignment of Prices with Patient Outcomes

Society

Reduced Healthcare Spending & Better Overall Health

NEJM Catalyst (catalyst.nejm.org) © Massachusetts Medical Society

CarePath app is purpose-built to collect a wide variety of patient data 

CarePath is an any-device patient portal, available as a responsive web application and a native app on Android and iOS. Patients can use the application to keep track of their patient journey, which can consist of various elements, such as: 

  • Patients can quickly fill in surveys (such as PROMs, PREMs, etc.) via iOS, Android or a web app – regardless of whether they’re in the hospital or at home. 
  • Other data, such as data from medical devices, medical records and lab results, are automatically made available in the CarePath app. 
  • Patients receive real-time feedback via our user-friendly dashboards. 

When enrolling new patients, the relevant information (e-mail address, phone number, etc) is automatically read from the EMR system, and there is no need for double entry. 

Insight is the technology used on the hospital side. It’s a web-based dashboard where healthcare professionals can look at the data patients have shared with the hospital. The dashboards are opened from within the hospital’s EMR application, automatically showing the right patient. 

The Insight dashboard provides three different levels of data analysis 

  • Treatment Room Dashboards 
    This primary level of analysis is the single-patient case aimed at supporting treatment room discussions. A patient-centred overview page indicates Quality of Life and other relevant metrics. Patient feedback is documented in detailed pages that handle scores per survey or domain. This allows your medical professionals to understand their patients better and improve patient care and treatment.  
  • Quality Manager Dashboards 
    At the department, speciality or disease group level, our Quality Manager dashboard provides insights into groups of patients and their outcomes across time (averages, standard deviations & trends). The goal of these dashboards is to inspire discussions on the delivery of effective health care. 
  • Registry Manager Dashboards 
    The Registry Manager manages invites, response rates and other topics related to data collection and its management. This dashboard helps you optimise compliance rates. 

The most significant advantage of our technology is that we can truly integrate with any EMR. We have ten years of experience setting up outcome collection in more than 150 hospitals and we use the most user-friendly tools to ensure high compliance rates, including native apps for iOS and Android.

Fabio Catarinella, Chief Medical Information Officer, Brightfish

Tailor-made solutions for your needs

The technology behind the questionnaires also allows specific local adaptations. In practice, we can create a tailored solution per country, client or department, so we can customise and update the questions while keeping the questionnaires validated for international research (based on e.g., ICHOM sets).  

Improved patient experience with CarePath: 

With the implemented CarePath Ospedale San Raffaele is able to: 

  • Engage patients with just-in-time reminders, relevant information ‘snippets’ and useful questionnaires during treatment. 
  • Track their patients over time with PROMs and NPS surveys to monitor them remotely and collect data valuable for them as a healthcare provider. 
  • Include wearables in their patient experience to help them innovate and enrich the data you wish to collect on health outcomes. 

Improved patient experience with Insight: 

With the implemented CarePath Ospedale San Raffaele is able to: 

  • Engage patients with just-in-time reminders, relevant information ‘snippets’ and useful questionnaires during treatment. 
  • Track their patients over time with PROMs and NPS surveys to monitor them remotely and collect data valuable for them as a healthcare provider. 
  • Include wearables in their patient experience to help them innovate and enrich the data you wish to collect on health outcomes. 

Next steps?

The following steps are implementing more pathways so outcomes of more diseases could be improved. But eventually, we would like to expand the whole patient portal so that the patients can do more with it, for example linking Bluetooth devices measuring their blood pressure, making sure the patient feels in control without continuously having to worry about their health status. 


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